Car Bomb Blast Near Wedding Party in Baghdad Kills 17

A car bomb near a wedding party has killed at least 17 people and wounded 25 more in a mainly Shi'ite district of the Iraqi capital.

Iraqi officials say some of those killed by the blast Thursday in the Abu Dshir neighborhood were children.

Elsewhere in Baghdad, the U.S. military said a roadside bomb that can penetrate armor, explosively formed penetrator killed two U.S. soldiers and wounded two others. In the past, the military has accused Iran of supplying such weapons to insurgents.

Also Thursday, the Washington Post reports deaths from sectarian violence in Baghdad have risen for the second month and are now higher than they were in January.

The newspaper says in June, according to the Iraqi health ministry, the number of unidentified bodies found on the streets rose to 453 - despite the deployment of additional U.S. troops.

But the paper also says the data show that fatalities from mass-casualty bombings and the level of violent civilian deaths in Iraq as a whole have declined since the beginning of the year.

The U.S. military says a helicopter crash that caused the death of an American soldier and injured another on Wednesday happened after the aircraft collided with electrical wires. The military said there are no indications the helicopter was shot down when it crashed in Nineveh province north of Baghdad.

The U.S. military also said today coalition forces have detained 15 suspected insurgents and killed two during raids in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq. Among those detained is a man it described as the "administrative emir" responsible for logistics and financing for al-Qaida in Iraq cells in a Baghdad neighborhood.